Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus (12 page)

“You’re all doing such a good job!” she cheered. It took over an hour, but we went through the whole entire play.

“Does anybody have any questions?” Mrs. Zirklezack asked.

“Yeah,” Penny said. “Why are the sea lions and dolphins being forced onto a bus?”

I looked at Mrs. Zirklezack to see what her reaction would be.

“It’s symbolic,” she said.

“But they’d die,” Penny said. “I thought this play was about saving things.”

“Again, it’s symbolic,” Mrs. Zirklezack said.

Penny shook her head. She looked pretty mad about being a sea lion. And Lilly looked pretty disappointed about being a dolphin, too.

“I’d prefer to swim alongside the bus,” Lilly said.

“Oh no,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. “In the final scene, all the animals disembark from the bus together. It’s a very important moment.”

Penny rolled her eyes.

“Any other questions?” Mrs. Zirklezack asked.

Polly raised her hand. This surprised me. Because
she usually didn’t raise her hand except when she had to go to the bathroom.

“Camille doesn’t have a part. She hasn’t been assigned anything,” Polly said.

Mrs. Zirklezack studied her clipboard. “What’s your last name, Camille?”

Everybody looked at me and I began breathing very quickly.

“McPhee,” I said.

“Camille McPhee,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. “Well, this is a problem.”

I didn’t like being thought of as a problem.

“But every problem has a solution. I’ll figure something out,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. “Now, everybody go back to class.”

We walked back to class in a big clump, our shoes squeaking across the gymnasium floor. Penny and Lilly wouldn’t stop talking about how much they hated their parts.

“I’ll look like a joke,” Penny said. “Everybody is going to laugh at me.”

“Me too,” Lilly said. “It’s not fair.”

And when Penny said that, I almost jumped right into her conversation and said, “That’s right. Life isn’t fair.” But I didn’t do that. I just kept walking. In the end, I didn’t think being a symbolic sea lion or dolphin was as bad as they made it sound. At least they both had parts.

Chapter 16
Talk it Out

W
hen I got home, I didn’t even look for my mother. I grabbed the phone and tried to call Aunt Stella. I dialed her number so fast that I accidentally called a dry cleaner.

“Sorry!” I said.

Next time, I dialed more carefully.

“Camille, I got your message,” Aunt Stella said.

“Isn’t it the worst news ever?” I asked.

“It’s pretty bad,” she said.

“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Dad can’t stay gone for four weeks. He can’t!”

There was a little bit of silence.

“Aunt Stella?” I asked.

“Camille, I’m going to tell you something and it’s not pretty,” Aunt Stella said.

“I’m ready,” I said. But that was a lie. I was not ready to hear anything ugly.

“These are your parents’ problems. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do,” Aunt Stella said.

I started to cry.

“I wish I could fix this,” Aunt Stella said.

“It’s because we’re in the hole,” I said.

“Well, that’s part of it,” Aunt Stella said. “But sometimes married people hit rocky times.”

“I know. I know,” I said. “They have ups and downs.”

“That’s very perceptive,” Aunt Stella said. “Camille, I love you so much. Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?”

But I couldn’t think of anything.

“I just like talking to you,” I said.

“You can call me any time,” Aunt Stella said.

“You’re not worried about our phone bill?” I asked.

“I’m more concerned about you,” she said.

And I thought that was one of the nicest things anybody had ever told me.

“What’s going on at school?” she asked.

And I didn’t even know how to start to answer that
question. Because way too many things were going on at school. So I just said the first thing that popped into my mind.

“I miss my friend Sally,” I said.

“The girl who moved to Japan?” Aunt Stella asked.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Well, parents tend to move most when their kids are still in grade school. But once they start junior high, it’s usually a different story,” Aunt Stella said.

“What?” I asked.

“In my experience, parents tend to move around more when their kids are younger. Once they get into the upper-grade levels, it’s more likely they’ll stay put,” Aunt Stella said.

“How come I’ve never heard this?” I asked. Nobody had ever mentioned that rule before. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to make friends until I was in junior high. This was useful information. Because I didn’t know whether or not I was prepared to be a dingo for that long.

“I’m sorry you miss Sally,” Aunt Stella said.

“Moving ruins everything,” I said.

“You’ll make other friends, Camille. You’re very charming!” Aunt Stella said.

But I didn’t even care if people found me charming or not. Because if my friends might move at any
moment, I decided it was better to wait until they were in junior high and would stay put before I became friends with them.

“I better go,” I said. “We’ve been talking for a lot of minutes.”

“Camille, I’m going to call you tomorrow. Okay?”

I nodded.

“Are you still there, Camille?” Aunt Stella asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

After I hung up the phone, I went in search of jelly beans. Because those things always made me feel better—for about five minutes. And then I began to feel worse. After I’d shoved quite a few into my mouth, my mother came into my room.

“What are you eating?” she asked.

And I knew that I wasn’t supposed to eat jelly beans, so I didn’t exactly say that I was eating them.

“Fruit flavors,” I said.

“What do you mean, you’re eating fruit flavors?” my mother asked.

“I’m eating the flavors cherry and lime and blueberry and piña colada,” I said. Then I wished I hadn’t said that last flavor.

“Piña colada?” my mother asked. Then she gasped. “Are you eating candy?”

I bit my lip.

“Camille! Do you understand how bad simple sugars are for your system?”

I nodded. Even though I understood that, simple sugars still tasted very good.

“Your blood sugar will spike and then you’ll crash!” she said.

The words
spike
and
crash
always frightened me.

“Don’t worry. I’ve only eaten about twenty,” I said.

My mother brought her hand to her mouth and gasped again.

“Get in the kitchen right now! You need to eat some cottage cheese!” she said.

So I did.

While I was spooning cottage cheese into my mouth, my mother came out of my bedroom holding a medium-size bag of jelly beans. They looked delicious.

“Where did you get these?” she asked.

But that was a hard question. Because I got them from lots of places. Sally had bought me a couple of bags before she moved. My father had brought me home some from Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, because there is a jelly bean factory there. And I’d been given a whole bunch at school from my Secret Santa. And I even bought some myself with my own money.

“How did you accumulate this many beans?” my mother asked.

She shook the bag in front of me and it made the beans shake in a very yummy way.

“I’ve been saving them for a long time,” I said. “And I eat them responsibly.”

“Twenty!” she said.

Then she set the beans down on the counter. And walked over to me and my cottage cheese.

“Camille, you can’t eat candy. It’s not good for you. It will make your blood sugar go up very high and then crash very low. You’ll get a headache and feel miserable. Do you understand?”

I shoved a whole bunch of cottage cheese in my mouth and let it sit on my tongue. She went over and picked the bag back up.

“If I didn’t love you, I’d give you back your bag of jelly beans and let you eat them all,” she said.

Then I watched her take the lid off the trash can and dump in my jelly beans. Even after she stopped pouring them, I could hear the beans rattling their way to the bottom.

“Doesn’t that feel better?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“Trust me,” she said. “It will.”

She came and sat down next to me and rubbed my back.

“Do you have any homework?” she asked.

“Math,” I said.

She smiled big.

“No
advanced
science?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“A little bird told me that science is going to become much less advanced,” she said. “Also, no more slaughterball.”

She kissed my head and then got up and started flapping her arms like they were wings.

“That’s okay, honey. You don’t have to thank me.”

Chapter 17
Cat Fate

I
really missed gifted reading. Because not only did I miss reading, but I also missed sitting in a bean-bag chair. Mostly, I missed Ms. Golden. So when Mr. Hawk said he had some bad news about Ms. Golden, I thought I was going to start crying in front of everybody.

“Ms. Golden will be out for another week,” Mr. Hawk said.

“Was there a problem with her surgery?” Penny asked. “Did they take out the wrong tonsil?”

I thought that was a pretty good question.

“No,” Mr. Hawk said. “She’s just taking an extra week to recuperate.”

He sat down at his desk and smiled.

“But I’ve got some good news,” he said. “Mrs. Zirklezack has tweaked her play to accommodate some of our class’s feedback. Also, she assigned the final part.”

Polly turned around and smiled at me. But I didn’t smile back. Because I wasn’t sure how I felt about this.

When we went to play practice, and Mrs. Zirklezack walked into the gym and smiled one of her spookiest smiles ever, I knew right away that I wasn’t going to like my part.

Mrs. Zirklezack called out a list of seven names. They were all girls, and my name was the last one. Penny Winchester, Gracie Clop, Nina Hosack, Lilly Poe, Zoey Combs, Hannah Pond, Camille McPhee.

“When I assigned the final part, I noticed that we had an odd number of animals. That didn’t work. So I changed some things. I’ve decided to make a chorus line,” she said, clapping. “You’re going to have your own musical number. You’re going to be cats.”

Lilly squealed.

“Does this mean I’m not a sea lion anymore?” Penny asked.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. “I’ve decided
to omit all references to aquatic animals. In the end, I thought it was a good idea not to load them onto the bus.”

“So I’m not a dolphin?” Lilly asked.

“Correct. You’re all cats,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. And while all the other cats started gabbing about how excited they were about their parts, Mrs. Zirklezack began explaining the cats’ “function.”

“Look around,” she said. And so we did. “No, I’m not talking about the Rocky Mountain Elementary School gymnasium. I’m talking about the civilized world. The cat population is out of control. I want our play to confront this issue head-on.”

Mrs. Zirklezack began distributing new scripts. We all flipped through them to see what our parts looked like.

“Oh my heck!” yelled Jasmine Rey, the amazingly popular sixth grader who’d been given the part of Nora. “You’re all going to die!”

I flipped through my script until I found the page. It was true. While all the other animals boarded the bus and headed to the sunny, safe place, the cats didn’t join them. There wasn’t room. Also, when Nora tried to catch us, we ran away.

“I want the audience to be reminded of how tragically overpopulated our communities are with unwanted cats,” Mrs. Zirklezack said.

We were supposed to sing a song called “We Can’t Come, We Won’t Come.” Mrs. Zirklezack wrote it herself. The song started off talking about how we wished there were more room for us. But then the song ends with all the cats deciding to just play around.

“This is depressing,” Penny said.

“No,” Mrs. Zirklezack corrected. “You’re not depressed cats. You’re a group of sassy cats. You’re going to be happy, willful, dancing little beasts. Nora tries to catch you, but you’re so busy singing and dancing that you get left behind.”

“I thought there wasn’t room for us,” Lilly said. “I thought that’s why we got left.”

“That’s part of the problem,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. “But you’re also very sassy.”

When Mrs. Zirklezack talked, she opened her arms out wide, and the little pockets of fat under her arms kept jiggling.

“You’ll be performing on top of these white plastic buckets,” she said, holding a bucket above her head so that we could all see it.

“Why?” Penny asked.

“It heightens the visual drama,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. “Plus, everybody will be able to see you.”

At first, I thought this was horrible, because if I tipped off my bucket, I knew that I would always be labeled as the hypoglycemic kid who kept falling down.
That was a lot of pressure. But then I realized it might be a good opportunity to show everybody that falling under the school bus was a onetime sort of thing. I could change my reputation.

I took my assigned bucket and looked around. By the deflated expressions on the other cats’ faces, it was clear they were disappointed with their roles.

“We’re going to die too early,” Penny mumbled.

“And too quickly,” Lilly added.

When Mrs. Zirklezack handed Penny her bucket, Penny blurted out how she felt.

“Real cats would try to live,” she said. “They’d scamper up trees or something.”

I looked around at the other cats. A lot of us were smiling. Everybody liked Penny’s idea. We didn’t want to think of ourselves as disposable cats.

“But your deaths are symbolic,” Mrs. Zirklezack said. “You’re struck down while misbehaving.” Her eyes twinkled when she said this and I thought someone would present her with the idea that we actually should be struck down by lightning or the hand of God, but no one did, and I didn’t bring it up.

After practice Polly came up to me and smiled. Her hair was looking less and less stringy these days, but I didn’t know why. Maybe she’d started using a volumizing shampoo. I should have told her that her hair looked good.